Thrashing (was: info center search. III.)

Dr Syd Nicholson wrote:

> The HTML tags. etc, for Netscape are not the same as those for IE. Many
> web pages contain code that determines the browser type and then sends
> the correctly formated page.
>
> Netscape isn't perfect, not as good as IE, but IE doesn't run under
> Linux. Also, most other web sites function perfectly with Netscape.
> Because other sites function correctly I suspect that the problem is the
> formatting of the web page rather than problems within Netscape itself.
>
> It would be nice to be able to run IE using the Windows emulator Wine,
> however, I have yet to get this to work.
>
> Netscape does have its problems, and maybe the Linux version of Netscape
> 6 is buggy, but I think it unlikely that only the IBM info centre site
> encounters these bugs. I have also tried the Linux version of Netscape
> 3. This isn't any better.

This is not an info center issue, but I just had to comment.

Look at the above post and think of the unproductive, wasted time
involved here.  We've got
all these mentioned:

Netscape Communicator under Windows
IE under Windows
Netscape Communicator under Linux
IE not available under Linux
Netscape 6 under Linux
IE under Windows emulator Wine (can't get to work)
Netscape 6 under Windows

and the incompatibilities.  Look at how much time and effort was spent
by 1 guy (as a user, mind you, not as a programmer) trying to find a way
to use this single web site.  And _none_ of it was not on solving the
business problem he had, it was trying to find info so he could solve a
business problem.

Back in college, when talking about memory management, when the OS spent
more time swapping programs in and out of memory than it did on actually
executing user program code, it was called "thrashing".

How many of you think we're "thrashing"?  And I don't mean in regards to
info center, I mean IT in general.  How many new things are we asked to
learn because they're the Next Big Thing and then are discarded 6 mos
later?  How many business issues don't get handled because we just
discovered a better way to do it, so we're going to wait until we take
that training course next month and then do it?  Where is the happy
medium?

--
Jeff Crosby
Dilgard Frozen Foods, Inc.
P.O. Box 13369
Ft. Wayne, IN 46868-3369
260-422-7531

The opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily
the opinion of my company.  Unless I say so.